leadership which made it possible to organize and train the first 1,000,000 men or more who came into the Army of the United States. This statement is borne out by the fact that when the emergency arose there were less than 15,000 officers in the Regular Army and less than 20,000 officers in the National Guard, while there have been more than 100,000 Reserve officers on duty with the Army of the United States. The Reserve oflicers were available immediately upon the beginning of the emergency to fill up the required officer personnel in the Regular Army and the National Guard units, and to make it possible to begin the organization of additional units."

At the Oklahoma City national convention of the Reserve Officers Association in June 1940, the Reserve officers, visualizing that a national emergency was approaching, and knowing that if and when such an emergency came the greater part of their number would be called to military duty, and that for this reason the association could not function by departments and chapters as heretofore, passed a resolution to discontinue the ordinary activities of the association if and when such a national emergency arose and to place the affairs of the association in the hands of a board of trustees. At the convention held in New Orleans in May 1941, this decision was reaffirmed.

Acting on this decision, and after the declaration of war, the national council of the Reserve Officers Association met in Washington, D. C., in January 1942, and by proper resolution closed the normal activities of the Reserve Officers Association and placed all of its affairs in the hands of the board of trustees, with full and unlimited power to control and administer the affairs of the association.

The board of trustees, consisting of the following: Col. Howard Emerson, of Boston, Mass.; Col. William M. Mumm, of Columbus, Ohio; Col. James E. McNary, of New York, N. Y.; Col. William B. Tuttle, of San Antonio, Tex., and Col. James P. Hollers of San Antonio, Tex., who was the president of the association at that time, then convened and took over the affairs of the association. Col. Howard Emerson was eleced chairman of the board; Col. William M. Mumm was elected vice chairman; and Col. James P. Hollers was elected secretary-treasurer of the board.

At a meeting held in Washington, D. C., in March 1944, the members of the board being of the opinion that the national emergency had progressed to the point where it became desirable, both from the standpoint of the interests of the Reserve officers and the standpoint of national defense, decided to partially reactivate the affairs of the Reserve Officers Association.

In November 1944, Col. James E. McNary was elected acting chairman of the board on account of the serious illness of Col. Howard Emerson.

In May of 1945 our headquarters were reopened at 1726 Pennsylvania Avenue NW., and Brig. Gen. E. A. Evans was elected as executive secretary of the association. Prior to being relieved from active duty last month, General Evans was chairman of the War Department General Staff Committee on Reserve Policy. He is a veteran of World War I and has been active in the Organized Reserves in California since that time.

He served on active duty during the present emergency from November 1940 until last month when he was relieved, at the request of the board of trustees of the Reserve Officers Association.

General Evans is here with me and would be glad to answer any questions that you may want to ask of him in connection with the relation of postwar Organized Reserve Corps plans with a universal military training program.

Since its very inception, the Reserve Officers Association has gone on record as being in favor of a military-training program for the youth of our Nation. Year after year in national conventions assembled the members of the association have expressed themselves as being in favor of such a law.

You gentlemen are probably most of all interested in knowing why Reserve officers are in favor of a universal military-training program. The military policy of this country is based on having a small welltrained Regular Army and a relatively small National Guard. The vast majority of officers and men making up the balance of a wartime Army must come from the citizenry. This has always been the case. In this war, of the approximately 800,000 officers we now have, only about 15,000 are Regulars. Of the approximately 8,000,000 men in service, only about 125,000 came from the regular service.

These civilian soldiers, in time of peace, can belong to the National Guard or the Organized Reserves. No provisions have been made in the past for trained enlisted men in the Organized Reserves. While in the past it may have been considered sufficient to have enlisted men only in the Regular Army and the National Guard, such is not the case today.

Always before we have been able to plan our defense based on the fact that we were surrounded by ocean barriers. We could plan on time being sufficient to allow us to mobilize and train our vast citizen army. The developments of World War II have shown us that it would be folly to rely on these barriers furnishing us this required time in the future.

What does this all mean? It means only one thing, that in order to be prepared to defend ourselves against any possible surprise attack we must have Army units, in being, sufficient in number, fully equipped, and well enough trained to neutralize the effect of such an attack until the balance of our citizen army can be mobilized and trained.

Based on the military strength provided for under the National Defense Act of 1920, our small permanent establishment and relatively small National Guard are not sufficient in size to supply the required number of such units; consequently, we must have certain Organized Reserve units fully organized, equipped, and trained.

In order to be abel to do this effectively we must be able to obtain the enlisted men. These men should be given a thorough training before they are assigned to Organized Reserve units. And this is why we of the Reserves are so vitally interested in a universal military training program.

Without such a program, it will not be possible to create and effectively organize the Reserve element of the Army of the United States. The creation of these Reserve elements is vital to the proper security of our country in the future.

One of the objections which has been made to a universal military training program is that such a system will tend to militarize the youth of the Nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The

training of these young men should be primarily in the hands of Reserve officers-citizen soldiers the same as the trainees themselves. All refresher training given to trainees after their required program should be in Organized Reserve units or National Guard units. All of such units being officered 100 percent by civilian officers.

Another objection is based on the possibility of interrupting the young man's educational period. This is a quarrel with a particular plan of universal military training rather than the system itself. The Reserve Officers Association believes that a plan can be developed by Congress that will in no way be a detriment to the trainee's education.

We will be training these young men to defend their country if the United States is attacked at some future date. Switzerland has employed this kind of defensive system for years and no one has accused her of setting a bad example.

Irrespective of what may come out of the San Francisco Conference, we must have a system that would allow this country to defend its own institutions, its own cities, and its own people, and the employment of universal military training has no bearing whatsoever on international commitments that might be required under any sort of a world order.

We of the Reserve Officers Association want a universal military training program, as we believe that it will make wars less likely. The mounting casualty lists are daily reminders of the need for a system that will decrease in any degree the possibilities of a conflict in the future. Reserve officers know personally what these casualties mean. A canvas was recently made of five combat divisions which have been in active operations for some time-three infantry divisions and two armored divisions. 57.7 percent of the battalion commanders were civilian officers, 97.1 percent of the company commanders were civilian officers; and 99.6 percent of the platoon commanders were civilian officers. Obviously, the casualties have been proportionately heavy among these civilian officers.

The citizen officers, the Reserve Officers Association, militantly feel that a system of universal military training is essential to the preservation of a national security system that every American has the right to expect.

Chairman WOODRUM. Thank you very much, Colonel.

Colonel TUTTLE. Thank you, sir.

Chairman WOODRUM. The committee will now recess until 2 o'clock. (Whereupon, at 11:30 a. m., a recess was taken until 2 p. m. of the same day.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

(Pursuant to the adjournment for the noon recess, the special committee reconvened at 2 p. m.)

Chairman WoODRUM. The committee will be in order.

Is Mr. William R. Mathews in the room?

Will you come around, Mr. Mathews, please?

Mr. William R. Mathews, editor of the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Ariz.

We are very happy to have you present, Mr. Mathews, and the committee will be very glad to hear from you.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM R. MATHEWS, EDITOR, ARIZONA DAILY STAR, TUCSON, ARIZ.

Mr. MATHEWs. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is William R. Mathews. I am editor and publisher of the Arizona Daily Star, of Tucson, Ariz., and a veteran of the old Fifth Regiment of marines of the First World War.

As a reporter who has covered the Orient once and Europe three times, with two visits into the Soviet Union, I have made a written record whose accuracy has been largely substantiated by subsequent

events.

I am a member of the Citizens Committee on Military Training for young men. What I have to say, however, represents solely my own views as an individual and editor.

The postwar military policy of our Nation should be based upon Congress seeing that we are not caught unprepared again. That calls for an appreciation of the lessons we should have learned from experience, and a reasonable appraisal of the future.

The great mistake that we have made is that we have allowed our political policy, that is, our foreign or diplomatic policy, to extend far beyond our peacetime military strength. As a result, when this political policy has been challenged, we have had to evade supporting it. We have dodged the responsibilities that it imposed. We have attempted to shift the work to others. Finally, when our political policy became irreconcilable with Germany and Japan, we had to go to war to support it. For more than 3 years we have been making war and building up our military forces to support our political policy.

We have failed to recognize our place of leadership in the world. A nation as large in area, as richly endowed with natural resources, peopled with as many vigorous, able, and intelligent men and women as ours, cannot avoid exercising political power throughout the world.

Our strength, our wealth, our ideals, and our activities, which range from those of missionaries to business salesmen and political evangelists, extend our influence everywhere. As a consequence, when we are timid, other nations are timid. Aggressors mistakes this vacillation for weakness, and are prompt to make the most of it.

If experience teaches anything, we have learned that we must not make this same mistake again. We must exercise the definite, confident leadership which a great power must give to the world.

In the formulation of our postwar military policy, therefore, we should be guided by an estimate of where our actual activities will probably reach, rather than by the necessarily cautious and restrained statements of our official foreign policy.

It is up to us to make appraisals of the various political forces that are active throughout the world and judge to a definite extent how these forces may affect us. This is critically important, because it is possible to foretell in many instances what governments are going to be compelled to do, not necessarily what they might like to do.

When I say this, I have in mind what some of our Army leaders were saying 5 to 8 years ago. They insisted that they had to know where they were going to fight before they could determine what our military force should be. This, I believe, represents a logical but

much too narrow basis upon which to build a military policy. We cannot expect all our foreign policy to be completely clear cut. That is asking too much of human judgment. But we can appraise tendencies and the implications of tendencies, together with the duties they impose.

For instance, in the Atlantic we now have numerous new military bases. That means it is our inescapable duty to fortify and garrison them. That will require more military manpower than we had, all told, in 1939.

In the Pacific we have conquered many new islands. We still assume the duty of defending the Philippines. We have an undeniable, indissoluble blood relationship with Australia and New Zealand. We are fighting a war, in part, to uphold the territorial and administrative integrity of China. We face an inescapable obligation to keep Japan disarmed and to maintain peace in the Orient.

All of these tasks call for the use of extensive military manpower for many years to come. Do the American people realize the scope of these minimum responsibilities which we have accepted?

We signed the Act of Chapultepec by which we agreed to come to the aid of any nation in the Western Hemisphere in case of aggression. That is a definite commitment which, if it is to command respect, must have behind it a known capacity to act promptly in order to forestall possible invasion, rather than act after invasion takes place. It will call for the maintenance of a trained manpower reserve that can be mobilized quickly.

Here are recognized minimum obligations that we have already assumed officially. They do not take into consideration the heavy responsibilities we will have for several years to come in Europe. The occupation of Germany will be a bigger and longer job than most of the people of this country realize.

If, in formulating our military policy, we are to profit from experience, we should instill in the minds of the American people the fact that we face a permanent political and military task in Europe. For instance, since the end of hostilities in Europe, the situation there has become clearer. A decisive and far-reaching historic change has taken place before our eyes.

Take a look at the map. The Red armies hold a strong military frontier that starts with the Elbe at the Baltic, runs down the Elbe to the barrier formed by the western mountains of Czechoslovakia, through the mountains of Austria to the Isonzo River in Italy, and thence down the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Unless we realize that this military frontier is going to become the western political frontier of the new Soviet Union, particularly if we abdicate on our past diplomatic policy of refusing to recognize aggression under any guise, we shall be seriously underestimating what the Soviet Union plans to do.

The Soviet Union is going to put all of that area under its control by setting up satellite governments just as it has done in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Within this entire area the Soviet Union will be master. It will tolerate no interference. That has already been proven dramatically in the case of Poland. The line of the Elbe in Germany marks a transcending historical change by becoming, unless we are willing to challenge it, the new western frontier of